I loved being wicked

From the lofty moral pinnacle reserved for those who have given up, quit, or otherwise eschewed smoking, I feel authorised to pronounce on the latest round of skirmishes in the world of tobacco. Tony Blair has announced that he is not averse to the idea of a ban on smoking in public, and might, should it prove to be true that there is no disadvantageous political smoke without a fire, insist that people who must do it, smoke in private.

Ken Livingstone, another who would blow hard on the Swan Vesta of incendiary intent, has indicated that he will, if attritional lobbying allows, introduce a public ban on smoking just like they did in New York.

As if these rumblings of interference in adult life were not enough, the doughty campaigners of the anti-smoking group Action on Smoking and Health (Ash) have got themselves in a tizzy about the imminent appearance on our screens of a comedy series called The Smoking Room.

The situation in which the action takes place is one of those tobacco ghettos that caring employers have introduced, in order to stop their employees catching a nasty chill by being banished to the street for a gasper. According to Ash, the fact that people are smoking and laughing at the same time sends out the wrong signals.

I haven't had a cigarette for more than 18 months, but it doesn't stop me being cross about the treatment being meted out to a club of which I was once a proud member. The brotherhood and sisterhood of smokers are a shining example of the principle of community spirit in action.

"Do you have a light?" "Of course." "I'm awfully sorry but I am temporarily bereft of tabs, might I filch one of yours?"

"Be my guest." From the humblest toiler optimistically sucking on a distressed roll-up, to the captain of industry with teeth clamped on a cigar as big as a table leg, there is a sense of democratic community in the smoking fraternity that transcends social and economic barriers. Fifty years ago, the smoker was, if not the norm, at least an accepted participant of life. Now the smoker is hounded by pillars of the community and through the post.

Cigarette packets are plastered with slogans such as "smoke contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide". Oh, and death. Not content with that, the other side of the packet carries a further warning, which can be summed up like this: if you really must kill yourself, please don't kill other people.

Unlike all the other noxious emissions in modern life, from cars, factories and the mouths of politicians, this is the one that carries the explicit health warning. And perhaps I have missed it, but I swear that bottles of alcohol do not bear the legend, "The fluid inside might damage your liver, plus a couple of other organs, and might make you hit someone with an iron bar."

The fact is that smoking has suffered irreparably from once being associated with the louche and glamorous lifestyle. All those mackintoshes with turned-up collars, trilbies and co-respondent shoes. Babes with malachite cigarette holders, blowing smoke rings through tight curls of platinum hair, and flashing the glad eye round the room like the top of a lighthouse.

Cigarettes, as anyone who has smoked will know, come into their own after pleasurable indulgence. What could be sweeter than the post-prandial puff, or more satisfying than the post-coital inhale? The reason that Blair and Livingstone and Ash hate tobacco is that it is inextricably entwined with naughtiness, and that would never do.

Personally, I hope that all their efforts founder and, of course, they will. In the same way that Prohibition saw the invention of many and adventurous ways to slake a thirst, so a smoking ban will only lead to cheekier ways of snatching a smoke.

It is the involvement of Ash that is the more worrying aspect. When comedy programmes are persecuted for sending out the wrong sort of smoke signals - and let us not forget that this is a comedy programme which has yet to be seen by the august members of Ash - then we have a problem which is more insidious than the regulation nannying and bullying of the traditional antismoking faction. That problem is one of latter-day Stalinism, and its eventual aim is to stub out the memory of every cigarette that ever existed.